[TuringTest]

How do you define "imperative" in a way that precludes a functional description of your definition? I'd say that if you're able to do that, you'd have found a contradiction in Turing completeness and win you a Turing award.

Also, this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30883863

[whimsicalism]

Just because every program in C is also expressable in Haskell does not mean that C is Haskell or that C is a functional programming language.

The same is true of CPUs, which at their base level execute instructions line-by-line to move and load things in and out of stateful registers as well as doing simple mathematics.

Not going to keep arguing, as I can see from your other comments that you are going to try to hold this line, and also your reasoning doesn't really make sense.

Everyone has heard of Turing completeness. It does not imply that all distinctions between the semantics of languages and the structure of hardware thus are collapsed. It means that you can write an equivalent program using different semantics or different hardware.

[TuringTest]

> It does not imply that all distinctions between the semantics of languages and the structure of hardware thus are collapsed. It means that you can write an equivalent program using different semantics or different hardware.

No, it means that every computable program or device can be described through functional semantics, and therefore that very same program running on that same hardware can be described mathematically with them (not an 'equivalent' program, but the same program with the same runtime behaviour, just described in low level with a different format).

That's a core principle of computer science that predates computers themselves, and people arguing about the benefits of the imperative style tend to be unaware of this fact, making their arguments look weak.